revisiting mistakes (in a healthy, non-obsessive way) is not silly at all. it is great for self growth, and in this case, is a great way to pass on wisdom.
What you're saying sounds very nice and correct, except it isn’t necessarily true.
It's extremely easy to draw wrong lessons in retrospect. There are so many variables, including personalities, market conditions, timing, constraints, and accidents of history. You can't recall or even really understand these things with any level of accuracy.
What ends up being most useful is the way experience fundamentally changes you as a person, not your regretful shower thoughts posted on Twitter.
So it may seem counterintuitive, but if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s in 1995, including the chaos, rather than trying to avoid it by applying all his "lessons learned".
Chaos is not what made them great. It was definitely part of who they were at the time, and thus part of their greatness. If you try to recreate chaos without recreating everything else within which that chaos happened to work, you will be miserable and also fail.
I suspect JC had plenty enough "being on the other side of chaos" during his VR days. It's not fun at all when it's someone else's chaos that you have to endure.
I'd agree you do need intensity in order to create breakthroughs. Not gonna happen in a "don't worry about it" type of environment.
"...he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995, including the chaos, rather than trying to avoid..."
And CTF originally was from Quake 1, the threewave CTF mod by Zoid which made it into Quake 3.
Threewave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFg2PPOmA74